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Brain salad surgery

Some brain surgery may be in my immediate future. Well, not so much brain, but cranial surgery.

I have something called superior semicircular canal dehiscence. There’s a part of the skull that’s supposed to be between my inner ear and my brain… On the left side, it’s gone, and on the right side, it’s almost gone.

One of the treatments is cranial surgery, and a surgeon gets to squish my brains around so he can get to the problem and fix it. The doctor is looking into some new, less-invasive procedures.

Apparently I may have had this problem for many years but have only had symptoms recently. And it’s in both ears, not just the one that was bothering me.

For weeks, it felt like there was something in my left ear. When I tilted my head forward or to the left, the ear would “close,” and it would sound like I was under water. I could hear my jaw moving, my heart beating, and everything echoed. Tilting my head back or to the right would “fix” it.

It’s just an annoyance right now, but for some people they can’t seem to live with it.

The interesting thing the specialist told me is that the procedure to correct it may, in fact, relieve some, not all, of my tinnitus symptoms. That, in itself, would be worth it.